The email address I give out doesn’t exist, but whenever sends me an email to an address that doesn’t exist it gets forwarded via the back-end of my email server to my actual email inbox. So I receive emails sent to those addresses, and the email I receive has the non-existent email address in the “To” field.
I end up sending email from this actual email, but I spoof the “From” email to the non-existent one. I’ve actually been planning on changing this, because it’s possible for people to read the header information and determine my actual email address. What I’m thinking of doing is creating “[email protected]” with a 0MB mailbox, and then using that for all outbound emails.
And yeah, like I say, after doing this for many years I generally get very little spam. There are a couple websites that apparently got hacked, their emails get spam, and things like my voter registration email (which is in the public domain) gets all sorts of crap. But LinkedIn was unique in that the spam started immediately. The only other website that this happened with was AdultFriendFinder.
Maybe the websites were compromised when I signed up on those occassions. My most recent LinkedIn account did not have this happen. However, it certainly fits the pattern of behaviour from LinkedIn, and furthermore that recent LinkedIn email also gets its share of spam these days, and it’s spam that’s related to the industry I work in. LinkedIn aren’t supposed to be giving this email out, and yet people get it somehow.